Welcoming Faraway Poets

You might be wondering why you’re reading an entry on a Friday rather than a Tuesday.

This is because I forgot to update on Tuesday, as explained in an entry from Wednesday. As such, my self-imposed punishment is to make two further entries this week. Each one needs to be a minimum of 500 words long, which is roughly double the content I would normally include.

Fortunately, there’s been a lot to talk about this week, not least last Saturday, when my open-mic event Hotchpotch welcomed the Edinburgh-based group I Am Loud. This was the second of two planned visits after the last one in September.

Most of the time, Hotchpotch is exclusively an open-mic event. There are no headliners, and every attendee is permitted up to seven minutes each to read work to an audience.

The members were advised far in advance that this event would be different, with just eight slots of three minutes apiece, plus three headliners. We had a smaller crowd than we would normally attract, a fact that might be blamed on the change of day and/or format, but it also meant we comfortably filled seven of the eight slots without disappointing anyone.

The three featured headliners were: Bex Sherwood from I Am Loud, the writer and activist Miss Yankey, plus our regular member Mark Richardson. I was interested to see how the three styles would play together because Bex largely performed work about cows, while the other two focussed mainly on social issues, albeit from different perspectives. Their styles, though, seemed to complement each other.

From my own point of view, I was able to relax a little more than usual. I Am Loud brings technical staff along, so my role was instead to welcome people at the door, sell poetry books, and take sign-ups for this and future events.

So what of future events? I Am Loud has expressed an interest in coming back for another collaboration next year, but that depends on funding. The financial structure of the poetry scene tends to mirror that of the live music circuit, in the sense that money tends to flow towards venues rather than performers. So if that funding arises, I – and the venue, I’m sure – will endeavour to accommodate them as well as we can.

The experience has also encouraged me to look further afield for other potential tie-ups.

In one case, there’s a YouTube creator I’ve been following for a couple of years. He’s looking for ideas he can film in 2023 before he winds up his current series. There’s a slim chance he’ll reply, but I’ve nonetheless pitched the idea of him performing at one of our shows. This would be as a punter, not a headliner.

I think the best approach to take for side projects is to accept that some will fail from the start, some will be popular at the start but quickly lose momentum, and others will still be standing for a long time. Hotchpotch itself was set up as a short-term experiment, yet here it is still thriving more than 12 years later.